Unicef Zambia - Participatory mobile data collection

An electronic survey tool to discover the effects of the global economic crisis on vulnerable families in rural Zambia.

Oct 2011 to Mar 2012

Purpose-icon

Purpose

UNICEF asked us to help them build and test an electronic survey tool, to discover the effects of the global economic crisis on vulnerable families in Mufulira, a mining town in northern Zambia.

UNICEF had been working with the Zambian Ministry of Finance and National Planning in six districts of Zambia to:

Raise understanding of the effects of the global economic crisis on vulnerable households in terms of their manifestations and the people’s responses;

Develop knowledge of specific interventions that can mitigate the negative impacts identified;

Use evidence so generated to advocate for national interventions that would help mitigate the worst effects of the global economic crisis.

The partners had discovered that data collection and reporting was slow and difficult, and they wanted to get information more quickly from the field, to help them to present up-to-date and relevant information to achieve policy change. They also wanted to involve the households being surveyed more directly in the project, showing them the benefits of donating their time and information to the project.

They decided to trial electronic data collection as a way to collect information more quickly and cheaply from the field, and be able to use the same devices to show participants the current results in real time using smart visualisations.

We were already in contact with the Institute for Development Studies, and they asked us to help with the project. They wanted us to provide training and technical support for Ruralnet Associates Limited in Zambia, who were undertaking these surveys.

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People

UNICEF and the Zambian Ministry of Finance undertook the project as a joint effort and provided funding for it.

The Institute for Development Studies at the University of Sussex provided the academic and scientific skills required to design the survey instrument and understand the data collected.

We provided technical assistance and training, mainly for Ruralnet Associates.

Process-icon

Process

We used agile techniques to manage our part of the project. In particular we divided the work into iterations and used a kanban board to prioritise and manage the work involved.

After working with IDS for several iterations to choose the best hardware and software platform, and to implement the survey instrument on it, we travelled out to Zambia to give onsite training to Ruralnet Associates, and went to Mufulira with them to provide technical support during the data collection and analysis process.

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Code

After a careful selection process as described in our Rough Guide, we chose the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet for the data collection hardware, and Open Data Kit (ODK) for the software.

The Rough Guide contains a lot of information, we recommend that you read it for more information about what we did and learned from this project.

We fixed some bugs and made some improvements to ODK Collect (the Android application), which you can find here: